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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

New Kitty Room

Now that we have a bunch of nice new furniture, eating dinner while staring at {and occasionally smelling} cat food was much less appealing. So we decided to move the kitty feeding area to the basement, into one of our two closets by the garage. But they looked like this....

Actually, I snapped those after I pulled out a few things...you don't want to see what it looked like before. The one on the left was mostly paper products, and the plastic drawers (which act as our medicine cabinet). The one of the right- well it was a mess. It pretty much had a little of everything in it, including a couple of boxes that we never unpacked.

So after so reorganizing and removal of stuff that really just needs to be donated, we had this...

Yes, those are my high school prom dresses... I have no where else to put them, haha. I should probably just find a charity to donate them to. I did manage to get an extra wear out of them by using them for sorority formal dresses (and trading with other people for formal). Anyways...

So we decided to turn the smaller of the two closets into the kitty room. But being the nice people that we are, we didn't want the kitties to have to eat in the dark, and since they can't use a light switch {at least that we know of... Lion does open cabinets}, we needed a lighting solution. I know, I know... cats have great night vision, but it makes us feel better....

We found that Leviton motion sensing light switch at Home Depot for about $19. It was super easy to install, and it worked! At least it did for us, not so much for the kitties. They are too low to the ground and it senses 180 degrees horizontally. We thought about turning the whole outlet on it's side {so the switch would sense 180 degree vertically}, but that started to be difficult when the electrical box wouldn't easily come out.

Throughout all of this, Nutmeg was extremely helpful.... can you tell? Yes, as a matter of fact, those are the instructions that tell you how to install the switch that Nutmeg is attacking...

So back off to Home Depot to figure out a new solution.... we ended up deciding on these things that you screw into the light bulb socket and then screw the light bulb into. They have lots of varieties, but this one has a motion sensor. It works really well and the kitties are able to activate it! We also picked up the wire hanging shelve at Home Depot for about $10 which has dry food containers and a water jug stored on it. On the actually wire shelve above that, we have kitty toy storage, cat health products (grooming, flea medicine, nail trimmers, etc), and extra dry/wet food storage. We also added that wood shelve from some scrap we had lying around to hold some wet food and their food bowls.

We still have to pick out a cat door to add so that we can keep the door closed. But overall I'd say this was a success! Our cats might be a little spoiled.... But hey, at least we don't have to look at their food anymore while we eat!